Five Critical Mistakes in Resumes
For the past few years, I’ve been working on resumes a lot for myself, proof-reading for my friends, and interviewing over dozens of people. I wanted to make a little contribution to this society by sharing my two cents based on my experiences. Today, I’d like to take some time to share the five critical mistakes that I’ve seen so far with you.
Typos and Grammatical Errors
First of all, I’d like to bring up the most common and fatal mistake that I’ve seen so far, which is the typos and grammatical errors.
If you would like to hunt for a professional job, you need to have a professional, error-free resume.
The best way for you to avoid this type of mistake is to have other people proofreading for you, they could be the career consultants at school, or your friends and family members. Normally I would suggest at least have 3–5 people do the proofreading to be sure that you have an absolutely error-free resume.
Another way to avoid grammatical errors is to use extensions or some other apps. For example, Grammarly is one of the resources that I’ve been using daily. It can not only help you detect potential grammatical errors but also recommend better word use for you, which indeed makes your resume more fluent.
In terms of tense, normally people use past tense for their experience in the past and present or present progressive tense for the current job/projects that they are doing. Be sure that you have both typo-free and right tense checked out before you submit the resume.
Inconsistent / Inappropriate Fonts
Going forward, I’d like to introduce the top second mistake for resumes, which is the inconsistent and/or inappropriate fonts used.
Be sure that you have your sections, spacing, fonts, font size, and alignment consistent throughout your resume. Normally, people use font size 10 or 12. Also, if you would like to emphasize some of your achievements in the resume, take advantage of using bold or italicizing or CAPITALIZING, and of course, double-check the logic or the format that you use is consistent as well.
In terms of Fonts, here are the 5 fonts that are appropriate from my own perspective:
- Times New Roman
Obviously, you can’t go wrong with Times New Roman, as it has been viewed as professional, formal, and traditional nowadays. In most of the papers/journals, they all required Times New Roman as the font.
However, sometimes you might find Times New Roman is too formal, and here are some of the fonts that you can consider using:
2. Calibri
Calibri is another famous font used by job hunters, and it works for both Windows and Mac OS systems. It’s professional and easy to read for hiring managers.
3. Cambria
I always use Cambria for my resume. To me, it’s between Times New Roman and Calibri as Cambria is less formal than Times New Roman and more formal than Calibri. It also works for both Windows and Mac OS systems.
4. Georgia
This font has been used by many large corporations, including the New York Times, Amazon, and Twitter. It’s also compatible with both Windows and Mac OS systems, and it’s easy to read when you send out your resume, especially in PDF format. One thing to keep in mind is that Georgia would probably make numbers look a bit not-aligned.(please see 10M and 2019 in Figure 5 above)
5. Helvetica
The last font that I’d like to introduce is Helvetia. You might be familiar with this font if you’re using Mac. It’s a built-in font for Mac, and Mac apps, such as Pages and Keynotes, are using this as the default font. However, for the some Windows OS systems, you might need to install the font to use. If you would like to use this font, I would recommend you to convert your resume into a PDF format so that you can ensure that your resume looks perfectly fine on other people’s machines/computers.
Missing and/or Irrelevant information
Normally, you will need the following sections in place on your resume:
- Personal information (Location e.g. New York, US, and contact information such as cell and email)
- Education
- Professional Experience
- Professional Skills
- Achievements/Awards/Projects/Competitions
- Publications (good to have but not-required)
There is no right or wrong answer in terms of the order as different kinds of jobs will have different preferred order for these aforementioned elements. In my resume, I put education at first, then professional experience, competition, and the last part is professional skills.
One thing that I’d like to bring up, I’ve seen some of the people putting irrelevant information on their resume. If you cannot relate your experience with the professional job that you’re seeking for, I highly recommend you to leave it out.
In addition, some people will put their personal hobbies in their resume, such as jogging, baking, singing and etc. I would personally prefer NOT to include those hobbies when applying for a professional job. Instead, I’ll use the space to put some related projects that I’ve conducted so far.
Lengthy Content
In terms of the length of the resume. Unless you have more than 5 years of experiences, make your resume with 1-page long.
Also, for each job experience, make each bullet one-line long, so that people won’t feel your resume is lengthy. In addition, you can make your format consistent and tidy as well.
Vague Experience
Please Please Please! Quantify your experience as much as you can!
In this post, I’d like to share my secret formula when it comes to listing my professional experiences.
In terms of the structure, the reason why I’m using verb at the very beginning of each experience is that it would strength the experience. Moving forward, I would put quantified results to make my experience look more solid, followed by a high-level professional experience (e.g. machine learning / deep learning althorigthms), and then in the last part, I would put the professional skills I used throughout the project, such as Python. I personally found this type of demonstration can help the hiring managers stay tuned on your resume and also make your experiences look vividly.
That’s it for today’s top 5 critical mistakes that I’ve seen so far. I hope you like it. If you like this post, please give me a appluse. I’ll try to share more relevant information in the near future.
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